The Woman In Green (1945)

Anyone wondering exactly when it became acceptable for cinema to treat women as the disposable objects of men who slash and chop them will be dismayed to watch this 1945 Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movie (number 11 of 14) because its mystery of attractive women in London turning up dead minus their fingers has the police suspecting a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer but when Sherlock Holmes gets to the bottom of things, the solution he reveals is a grim social indictment that suggests long before the modern slasher women were being slaughtered in cinema for the flimsiest reasons imaginable.

★★★★☆

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Scarlet Street (1945)

What an interesting film Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street turns out to be after it starts off a kind of farce, with Edward G Robinson playing unhappily married Christopher Cross, a patsy beguiled and manipulated into financing the lifestyle of hs mistress, Joan Bennett's femme fatale Kitty March, but towards the end, things turn psychologically dark, there's a murder, and then the movie ends with unmistakeable references to the director's The Woman In the Window, the less capitivating film noir he released a year earlier with all the same actors, many of the same plot details, but one that you must watch in conjunction with Scarlet Street to appreciate the lighthearted apology being made.

★★★☆☆

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The House of Fear (1945)

As in Conan Doyle's The Five Orange Pips, the arrival of a series of envelopes containing orange pips portends the grisly death of each recipient but where there are three deaths in the Openshaw family in the short story, there is a body count of seven in this film - a lot for a movie with a runtime of 69 minutes - and although it's good fun and Basil Rathbone is Sidney Paget's illustration of Sherlock Holmes come-to-life, and although the movie is deliciously spooky and the murders unspeakably gruesome - details that murder mystery fans will relish - the rush of deliveries of 'orange pip letters' one after the other after the other to a diminishing group of members of the Good Comrades Club seated night after night at their dining table in the gothic Drearcliff House gets a touch repetitive and ridiculous after, say, the first three.

★★★★☆

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And Then There Were None (aka Ten Little Indians) (1945)

Like most other film versions of Agatha Christie's 1939 murder mystery, Rene Clair's 1945 adaptation fudges the book's climax, adhering instead to the more sanitised ending of Christie's 1943 stage play, but otherwise this movie is faithful and the story of characters summoned by a mysterious stranger to a remote island where they are picked off one by one is suitably chilling, creepy, puzzling, and there is also plenty of humour like a wonderful scene of cabin fever paranoia and fear that literally has each character being watched as they in turn watch another.

★★★★☆

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Spellbound (1945)

The solution to the mystery relies on far too pat "dream detective" work and Ingrid Bergman's psychoanalyst's flight from police with a mentally ill stranger is a subplot rehashed from previous Hitchcock successes presumably as a counterbalance to this film's otherwise psychobabble plot, but Spellbound is still a joy full of humour, some tongue-in-cheek sexism (and some not) and is great fun with a Dali dream sequence and an intriguing Freudian mystery.

★★★★☆

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